Librarians Rock at Plunkett Research

Librarians who visited the Plunkett Research (www.plunkettresearch.com) booth and saw a demo of its business and industry research system got to take home a cool t-shirt that read “Librarians Rock—Support Your Library.” They could also learn about some recently added features. The new Build-A-Report lets users create professional quality custom industry reports on-the-fly in PDF format. CEO Jack Plunkett says the tool first ran in beta and then launched after they made important enhancements based on user input.

Here’s how the company describes the process. In 90 seconds or less, subscribers can enter one of dozens of Plunkett’s industry-specific centers (covering industries ranging from nanotechnology to alternative energy, banking, insurance, and many more) and select all or selected portions of:
• Industry-specific trends
• Industry-specific statistics
• Top companies (up to 10) by NAIC code and by U.S., non-U.S. or both
• Rank the top companies by sales, profits or employee count
• Company profile details
• Company address
• Company executive contacts by title
• Industry glossary

The service’s new MyResearchAccount lets individual users set up personal accounts and save searches. You can make comments, edit searches, run them again, and delete.

What I didn’t realize is that all Plunkett Research data is written and researched in-house by Plunkett’s team of analysts—Plunkett does not buy data from outside sources. Also, Plunkett Research is the sole outlet for this data, as it does not sell to any aggregators. Markets for the service include public, academic, government, and corporate libraries, as well as corporate marketing departments.